Page:Metamorphoses.djvu/357

 METAMORPHOSES BOOK VI This woe shortened the days of old Pandion and sent n down to the shades of Tartarus before old age came to its full term. His sceptre and the state's control fell to Erechtheus, equally famed for and for prowess in ars. Four sons were born to him and four daughters also. Of these two were of equal beauty, of whom thou, Procris, didst make happy in wedlock Cephalus, the grandson of Aeolus. Boreas was not favoured because f Tereus and the Thracians 1; and so the god was long kept from his beloved Orithyia, while he wooed and preferred to use prayers rather than force. But when he could accomplish nothing by soothing words, ough with anger, which was the north-wind's usual and more natural mood, he said: <"I have eserved it! For why have I given up my own weapons, fierceness and force, rage and threatening and had recourse to prayers, which do not at become me? Force is my fit instrument. By force I drive on the gloomy clouds, by force I shake sea, I overturn gnarled oaks, pack hard the snow, pelt the earth with hail. So also when I meet brothers in the open sky-for that is my battle struggle with them so fiercely that the mid-heavens thunder with our meeting and fires leap justice daughters moods, all the and y - ground-I bursting out of the hollow clouds. So also when have entered the vaulted hollows of the earth, and ave set my strong back beneath her lowest caverns, I fright the ghosts and the whole world, too, by my beavings. By this means I should have sought my wife. I should not have begged Erechtheus to be ." With ny father-in-law, but made him to be so 1 Since the home of Boreas was in the north, he was ncluded in the hatred felt at Athens for Tereus aud the T'hracians. 837